Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

It was because of that early interest in “Big Science” and fascism that I applied to the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) for a postdoctoral research grant that would fund my early investigations of the history of Portuguese state laboratories. Maria Paula Diogo welcomed me at the Interuniversity Center for History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT) of the University of Lisbon and the New University of Lisbon, and in the following years she would become my main interlocutor among the expanding community of Portuguese historians of science and technology. I have presented my work at several CIUHCT seminars, and I am very grateful to all the faculty members and students who took part, especially Ana Simões, Henrique Leitão, Ana Paula Silva, Ana Carneiro, and Maria Luísa Sousa. Considering the difficult budgetary situation of Portugal in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I have been amazed by how Maria Paula Diogo and Ana Simões were able to direct the main center of the discipline in the country, promoting excellent research, constantly supporting a large cohort of young scholars, organizing important international events, and maintaining a vibrant intellectual agenda around issues of knowledge production in peripheral contexts. I am also thankful to historians of science and technology and STS scholars working in other institutional settings in Portugal, namely Ana Cardoso de Matos, Fátima Nunes, Ana Luísa Janeira, Maria Fernanda Rollo, João Arriscado Nunes, and Tiago Santos Pereira.

That same postdoc grant also funded my first stay at the history department of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), to which I was attracted by the work of M. Norton Wise. Norton’s ability to intertwine the technicalities of concrete historical scientific practices with general concerns of history (empire, state formation, romantic culture, Nazi ideology) has been an inspiration for my own work ever since. I would return twice to UCLA as a visiting professor (in 2007–08 and in 2011) and would benefit greatly from the friendship and scholarship of Norton and Elaine Wise, Theodore Porter, Mary Terall, Soraya de Chadarevian, Sharon Traweek, and Kevin Lambert. UCLA graduate students and postdocs in the history department and at the Institute for Society and Genetics were uniquely stimulating. Robert Schraff, Lino Camprubí, and Carrie Friese were particularly generous in their intellectual interactions. Stevan S. Dubljevic was my daily interlocutor in Los Angeles, and many of the hypotheses put forward in this book were first expressed in long conversations with him and Vladan Jankovic, with the help of some very cheap pinot noir.

In 2008, while at UCLA, I was given a chance to organize, together with Norton Wise, a workshop on genetics and the political economy of fascism. The intense discussions among the participants were particularly important for the formulation of many of the methodological and historiographic questions addressed in this book. I am very grateful to Jonathan Harwood, Francesco Cassata, Gesine Gerhard, Lino Camprubí, Lourenzo Fernández Pietro, Bernd Gausemeier, and Christophe Bonneuil.

It was at UCLA that I decided to transform a project originally dedicated exclusively to the Portuguese context into one that would include the Italian and German fascist regimes. The abundant resources of UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library and easy access to the whole University of California library system—the largest academic library system in the world—helped to enlarge my historical ambitions and imagination. I owe to California’s public system of higher education the privilege of consulting in my office, for extended periods of time, the complete series of journals published by the Portuguese National Agricultural Experiment Station, the German Imperial Biological Institute, the Italian colonial agricultural services, and the Mozambican Center for Scientific Research of Cotton.

In the years 2005–2012, while at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon as a research scholar, I came across a major school of research in the history of fascism. My insistence in this book on the importance for historians of science of engaging with political, social, economic, and cultural historians of fascism is a direct result of my exposure to ICS scholarship. The more generic points made about fascism in the text emerge from dialogues with the ICS historians Manuel Lucena, António Costa Pinto, Pedro Lains, Jaime Reis, Luís Salgado de Matos, José Luis Cardoso, Dulce Freire, and José Sobral. I am particularly indebted to Manuel Villaverde Cabral for many long conversations on the importance of considering a continuum of fascist experiences across Europe. I am sure he will recognize his influence in my obsession with fascist “ideology of the land.”